Yet in these corridors men were continually finding alcoves: and these alcoves, as reflection had already suggested, were of two sorts. Men found solace in--to continue my figure,--alcoves of useless or even of reprehensible action; and in alcoves of thought. By the rogue, and by the rather rarer addict of mental exercise, might, at reasonable intervals, diversion be obtained as we passed toward the exit at the end of the inescapable corridor.... Well, and as I continued idly to regard my books, I noted in particular two volumes which yet stood side by side. Their appearance in America had been, I recollected, contemporaneous. And these two relatively enfranchised types of men--the thinker and the rogue,--had then been, I considered, afforded exoteric illustration, by that most quaint of accidents which gave us simultaneously as published books _The Education of Henry Adams_ and _The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel_. I could remember thinking that not often were thus coincidently granted, for the first time to Americans, two volumes with such a plausible air of being destined for longevity,--although the cautious would affix to the making of this assertion the rider that each book centres on a personality which is by way of being unfairly beguiling. Each protagonist here is a personality evocative of the reader's friendship, in the instant happy way in which people between book-covers are privileged to establish such relationship with beings less permanently issued in flesh; and so each of these two evades calm judgment. For to many of us these had figured at once as new-found, heart-delighting and eminently "personal" friends,--this Ulenspiegel come a-swaggering out of Belgium, and this wistful Adams then just released from the decent reticences of living,--and we perforce appraised them with a bias of friendship rather than by any code of strictly "literary" values. Still, the two figures appeared quite perfectly to illustrate the seeking of diversion in alcoves of reverie and of misdemeanor. To Adams I decided to come back: and to the Fleming I turned with frank confession that of the somewhat incongruous pair one finds Tyl Ulenspiegel the more difficult to judge with any pretence of equity, precisely because this Tyl is, as I suggested at the beginning, a rogue.... § 26